“There are specific root metaphors, and by this I mean specific metaphors are selected, that comprise what we might understand as the basis of our lexical and semantic intelligence. This is, approximately, the interface that provides the services that allow us to relate otherwise extremely disparate phenomenon: awareness, consciousness, experience … and representation. As for the final member of that series, metaphor can be reasonably understood to comprise the unseen bases of meaning, in its sense as an experience rather than a naked definition (naked of meaning it is merely words in a sequence) or denotation.

The recognition and exploration of this fact reveals unexpected dangers and opportunities. What has happened over time, is that the inherent diversity of the metaphoric roots of meaning in specific language cultures (and these include subcultures and even individual minds) has been shaved away by peculiarly aggressive socio-semantic forces which, while they cannot be said to be conscious or alive or intelligent themselves, can easily obtain these features from what we may understand as their hosts. These hosts are, approximately, the social-representational aspects of our minds, relationships, media, intelligence, and imagination. Over time, these forces have aggressively degraded the root metaphors that underlie not only our intelligence, but our perception. They are also involved in -specifying the available depth and breadth of our developmental opportunities-, or, conversely, in cruelly prescribing them in terms so narrow as to comprise what we must functionally understand as traps, cages, and torture.

I call these root metaphors ‘holophores’, and they are slightly unique in each mind, culture, examination or situation. The ancient peoples were aware of this matter, and we have forgotten it. They knew that certain simple ideas represented root metaphors from which -all other ideas- inherited their character, possible sophistication, biases, and so on. These ‘concepts that were also metaphors’ not only informed all other ideas, they informed each other, and thus represented ‘a self-informing cognitive framework’ surpassing anything we can reasonably yet imagine. Yet, our minds are -based on this framework-. And we can -directly manipulate- the now damaged roots.

There are many examples. A single example is the weapon we call the bow. One of its polarities is the snare. Usually these elements come in pairs, and the distance -between- these pairs is highly charged. In fact, this paradigm of polar opposites locked into relation ‘across a distance’ is fundamental not only to the concept of holophores, but to the nature of our minds and even the structure of our brains and nervous systems.

Consider the bow. The curved or recurved element of potential. The perfectly straight element of embodiment. By ‘increasing the curve’, in one of two ways, the straight element is either loosened, or -acquires an angle-. When it acquires an angle, this is often due to the introduction of an -arrow- which can be understood to represent intention, directionality, communication, transmission, penetration, domination, insemination, control, death… and so on. The narrower the angle, the more force the arrow conveys. The broader the angel, the less. And so on.

But the peculiar thing about this ‘bow’ metaphor is that it pertains to itself. To language. To thought. To seeing. To knowing. To communication… in fact… almost to everything, each thing being uniquely informed and or delimited by its relationship with ‘the bow’.

And this is the nature of holophores, and much more I will not here report. But know this. Ours have been raped. Stolen, crushed. What once were forests are now highly polished rods without members, branches, or appropriate connections. We cannot be intelligent with these. We can only be mechanical, or worse.

Language is a technology-like framework. But it is not a thing. In human cultures, it acts more like a collection of autonomous processes which, unguided by human awareness and intention, become effectively demonic; that is to say, they drive us around like cars for the sake of wreaking havoc. The reason is simple; it is our own minds signalling to us. And their signal is one of crisis, emergency, and urgent necessity.